Closing the Gender Gap

Earlier this month, Mitt Romney started wooing women voters with talk of jobs, not birth control and abortion. He’s onto something. The “war on women” rhetoric was starting to strain credulity a little. While the Republican-led attacks on contraception funding and access to abortion certainly amount to a rollback in reproductive rights, “war on women” is overheated: what we’ve been seeing is more than the “kerfuffle” Republican strategists want to demote it to, but less than what some Democrats have made it out to be.

Besides, it’s true that women do not vote like “some monolithic bloc,” as President Obama said at a recent press event, and that they don’t necessarily like to be told that they should. Opinion on social issues doesn’t shake out neatly along gender lines. Indeed, on abortion, there is virtually no gender divide: fifty-two per cent of women and fifty per cent of men think it should be legal in all or most circumstances; forty-two per cent of women and forty-four per cent of men think it should be illegal. (Gay marriage is another matter: fifty-three per cent of women support it, compared to forty per cent of men.) As a commenter on a conservative Christian blog noted recently, complaining about a map of the best states for women that used access to abortion as one of the criteria, “No thought was given to the fact that many women are not for and would not want easy access to abortion.” Education level turns out to be a more reliable predictor of attitude on abortion than gender, with college-educated Americans the most likely to say it should be legal in most cases.

There has always been a tension in catering to the women’s vote, and, indeed, in feminism: part of what women want, understandably, is to be treated like anybody else, with interests and beliefs that transcend gender; they also want, just as understandably, an acknowledgement that they are sometimes treated differently and unfairly, for no other reason than their gender.

The trouble with Romney’s gambit was not that he tried to change the subject, but how he did it. “There’s been some talk about the war on women,” he said at a campaign event in Wilmington last week. “The real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration.” And then he went on to say—over and over again, while his press secretary, Andrea Saul, tweeted the same line—that women accounted for “92.3%” of the job loss under Obama.

The first problem with this assertion is that it was, as PolitiFact concluded, “mostly false.” Construction and manufacturing jobs—jobs dominated by men, in other words—are typically the first to go in a recession, and the first to bounce back in a recovery. The recession started under Bush, and it was male employment that took the hit first, in 2009; since then, women have lost more of the jobs because sectors like government and education were affected later. “I don’t think you could point to a single piece of evidence that the pattern of job loss: men first, then women, is due to the president’s policies,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It’s a historical pattern that has held in previous recessions. ” What Romney was focusing on is a blip—“myopic economics” as Hanna Rosin, the journalist and Double X editor, put it. In the long-term view, it’s the sectors of the economy where women are more likely to be employed—heath care, for instance—that have weathered the recession the best, and will continue to do so. And anyway, even if women were shedding jobs at a higher rate than men, what would Romney, the free-market Republican, do about it as President? Try to muscle through some sort of regulation ensuring that women and men are employed in equal numbers?

But here’s the bigger problem with Romney’s rhetoric. Women may not constitute a monolithic bloc, but they’re not unpredictable atoms, either. The gender gap is real. It’s why Romney is trying out this what-women-really-care-about approach in the first place. It’s why he’s taken that awkward remark by the Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen, about Ann Romney “never having worked a day in her life,” and run with it, hoping that, if he repeats it enough, it will sound like woman-bashing. Among women, Obama leads Romney by nineteen percentage points, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll from earlier this month. Indeed, in most Presidential elections since 1980, women have been more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate. Women of all ages and ethnic groups are more likely to identify as Democrats than as Republicans or Independents. Forty-five per cent of women say they’re Democrats, versus thirty-two per cent of men, according to a 2009 Gallup poll.

The reason women are more likely to vote Democratic has less to do with what we generally consider women’s issues than Democrats seem to think. But the real reason means that Republicans will find it difficult to close the gender gap: women tend to support big government.

“For more than a decade, women have been more likely than men to favor an active role for government,” said a Pew Research Center report released in March. “And recent surveys show that higher percentages of women than men say that government should do more for the poor, children, and the elderly.” Women advocate strengthening government regulation, especially on health, the environment, and food and workplace safety, much more than men do.

Women voters did not always prefer Democrats. A lot of contemporary commentary dates the origins of the gender gap to 1980, and specifically to the Reagan administration, so we tend to think of the divide as always having put women on the side of Democrats. In fact, there was intermittent evidence of a gender gap before 1980: it favored the Republicans. Women in general were thought to be more conservative. They supported Hoover, for instance, over Al Smith, because Hoover was a Dry and Smith was a Wet, and women tended to endorse Prohibition. An unnamed Democratic Party official complained to a reporter for the Times in 1960 that the Democrats’ hardest challenge was “getting that wife out to vote. Many of the women are confused by the voting machine, or they let the husband do the voting, or they can’t get away from the house and the kids.” Women preferred Eisenhower in the Presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. Declared another Times analysis of women in politics, this one in 1964: “Both parties believe that women vote Republican.”

It’s possible that women were more conservative before 1980. But it’s also possible that they placed a similar value on social programs and government aid to the poor as they do now, but did not see Republicans as so hostile to government as they do now. Possibly because Republicans weren’t so hostile to government. Romney can tell women voters that he shares their concerns about the economy, but caring is not the same as agreeing on what to do about it.

Photograph by Eric Thayer/The New York Times/Redux.

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